Subsections below:
The game room—a good start
The “student manager” level—a definite step up
The business structure of the MC—not what you’d expect
The big administrative staff, and some “ancillary” other workers
What’s next
A job I had when I was a college
student and for well over a year after my graduating looks better with age.
This was being an “assistant [building] manager” at the Cloyd
Heck Marvin
Center, or “the Marvin Center”
as it was usually called (and which I’ll nickname “the MC” here). As I ponder
changing my career, it occurs to me that I could try to reprise something of
what I did at the MC years ago—except I know that, in general, the college
culture and its related “infrastructure” have changed somewhat, and if I opted
for such a job today, my type of MC work—on the audiovisual, technically-support-an-event
side, especially—would require me to know more than I do of various computer
platforms (something like PowerPoint would only be a slight start).
You may ask what I mean about
how college culture and its related infrastructure have changed. Actually, I
don’t have a big “database” on this right now; but from what I gather from
various sources—such as things tied to my nephew in college, or stuff I see at
a local county college, or things I read in the newspaper—there seems to be
quite a bit more of what I would call “hand-holding” of students in college,
and not dissimilarly, more amenities that reflect the rising tide of increased
tuition and college’s currying favor with families with big incomes. One thing a
lot of my MC anecdotes will convey is, a mere 30 years ago, how much less
hand-holding there was, especially when it comes to what we paid student
workers were sometimes expected to deal with or shoulder.
This multi-part account of an
old work period of mine will serve several purposes—including such topics with
relevance today as dealing with people with imposing mental illness or
substance abuse, which I’ll look at in anecdotes. This Part 1 may seem on the
dry side at times, but it’ll give a baseline for tasty anecdotes. Also, for
those who find some of my workplace accounts a little too focused on details, the
benefit of this MC stuff (in future parts) will be like an old 1980s video,
when you’re in the mood for it: the vagaries of memory will mean that some of
the recollections are fuzzy and a little blurred on details, like an analog
video whose photography is such that you don’t care if it seems like it was done in murky
water.
A couple bits of history are in
order. First, my work history at the MC, sketched.
The game room—a good start
I started out as a game room
attendant, on the fifth floor of the MC. (Actually, it was the sixth floor, but
it was named the fifth floor; we’ll get to an explanation of that.) The “game
room” actually encompassed a bowling alley—10 or 12 lanes, I think (the MC was
known to have one of only two bowling alleys in Washington, D.C., if I
recall)—and, on the other side of the floor’s main corridor, a room containing
pool tables and video games. There were also a few video games in the bowling
alley. In those days, video games consisted of (in large stand-alone consoles) Pac
Man, Space Invaders, and I think the first iteration of Donkey Kong, among
others. There were also pinball machines.
The game room attendant was
largely a cashier, who did other small tasks. You handed out shoes to bowlers, and
took them back (and I don’t recall in what way bowlers paid anything—a deposit
for shoes was necessary, and maybe there was a small set fee for playing). For
those who wanted to play pool, you handed out sets of pool balls; people were
charged for length of time playing, I think. Cues were already in the room. And
there was some handling of cash. A lot of what we cashiers did was make change
for those who wanted quarters for the video games. On occasion there was
someone who would plunk down a $10 bill for a whole roll of quarters.
The game room was one of the few
facilities in the MC where a cashier was an important worker who had to follow
rigorous procedures for handling cash (the “Information Desk” on the ground
floor was another; its nickname was the “Info Desk”). Cashiers got cash bags at
the start of their shifts, and returned cash bags with that day’s take, and
followed certain rudimentary accounting practices, all under the aegis of the
MC’s accounting department (headed by Johnnie ____—I forget his last name).
Other “concessions” in the MC—especially the food facilities, cafeterias on
different floors—were independent of the MC’s accounting/business functions.
For one thing, the food concessions were run by Saga, a large food service that
had concessions in other parts of the city. Not surprisingly, Saga was
routinely derided by students, especially for its facilities that were in, I
think, two dorms—one was Thurston Hall (which big dorm provides a lot of
stories in its own right, but I hold off on that).
I will get into the business
structure of the MC shortly—this will be important to understand other, staff
matters. The game room attendant was someone whose most important function was
as a cashier (as was obviously the case with cashiers at retail facilities that college students could
work at in a myriad other places), but he or she had other details to attend
to: watching for trouble, picking up gaming equipment left behind, closing up
the facilities at night’s end, whatever. It was a good starting job for me and
the others (students, mainly) who did it.
The game room was headed by a
Bob Case (probably deceased now); he had been a professional, or longtime
amateur, bowler, and he was able to fix the Brunswick bowling-pin resetting machines that
frequently broke down. That was another thing we game room attendants had to
troubleshoot with, who were able; I did this and learned some of the ways of
the temperamental pin-resetting machines. (Boy, those days go long back.)
I had that job for three
semesters: both freshman semesters, starting in October 1980, after I had been
at college about a month; and my first sophomore semester, September-December
1981.
The “student manager” level—a definite step up
I became aware of “student
managers” or “student assistant managers”—there were different technical names
for the job, depending on how casual one would be about it—who sometimes swung
by the game room. They “managed” the whole building (and it was a massive
building). By what particular means—whether someone individually helped me, or
I just applied—I don’t remember, but I
became a “student assistant manager” starting in January 1982. I would then
have the student form of this job every semester until I graduated in May 1984,
and including summer 1983 (I went home for summers 1981 and 1982).
Then in May 1984, after having
applied for it (among whoever else), I landed the permanent version of the job
I’d had, assistant building manager—and my particular slot for the new staff
job was the weekends, Friday through Sunday, about 4 p.m. through closing (this
was usually 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, and about midnight at the end of
Sunday). I think I had been working the weekend slot in my last one or two
student semesters there, hence the permanent slot was a good fit; but student
managers could be scheduled for all kinds of shifts through the week—whatever their
class schedule allowed, along with staff managers’ discretionary heeding of their preferences.
In general, there were three
shifts for building managers: about 7 a.m. through 4 p.m., which obviously
dealt with daytime activities and ran into more “traffic” in terms of students
using the building for meals, lunch being by far the biggest in terms of
traffic (student managers had nothing to do with the meal activities, which
Saga was responsible for). The second shift, 4 p.m. to usually midnight, dealt
with evening activities, where the assistant managers’ roles usually were more
extensive, because we provided ad hoc and usually pre-outlined audio-visual and
other such technical support for activities in the building, which could range
from simple lectures or meetings to large parties or mini-concerts in the MC
“Ballroom.” More on all that soon. Assistant managers also oversaw what the “Housekeeping”
staff did—this was a staff of permanent workers who set up furniture, cleaned,
etc. (all blue-collar-type work)—and usually we didn’t have to direct them;
only sometimes was there some technical glitch we had to consult with them on.
The last shift, midnight to 7
a.m., was usually handled by a permanent staffer, Zak Johnson, who rigorously
turned up for work but sometimes needed a substitute, and it was a student who
could sub for that shift. Once in a while I did it, either as a student or as a
permanent staffer, I believe. We’ll talk more about Zak soon, too.
The business structure of the MC—not what you’d expect
Let’s look at what kind of
“student union” the MC was.
A “student union,” to my
surprise in later years in my experience related to those entities (say, through
1987), was usually a wholly student-run affair (and for convenience, I’ll use
the past tense for now): it comprised a central facility, a building, that
provided a forum for special events, like a concert, or some assembly; and it
provided food and/or entertainment (gaming) amenities. It was a sort of
one-stop facility for those events and services of importance to students that
were outside the realm of pure academia (the latter facilities being classrooms,
labs, etc.).
In the case of George Washington
University (which in more recent years calls itself “The…,” but I’ll call it by
the name I knew it), which was a very large university (total student
population, including those living in the dorms as well as commuters and night
students, was about 15,000, I believe), was apt to have a large student union.
This meant the student union was a large building, and because the school was
located on city streets—i.e., over blocks and blocks (somewhat like NYU)—where
real-estate footprints are expensive, it meant a multi-story building.
The MC had six floors for
student use: the ground floor (which actually had the smallest available space
for student use, though it also led to the book store, which was an essential
amenity, located under the big MC theater, and run by an independent business
entity), and the first through fifth floors. There also was a level above the fifth
floor, which housed furnaces, “chillers” (huge contraptions meant for air
conditioning), and other such stuff as you would usually see in the basement of a building. And there were
levels of parking space in about seven levels under the building (each not as
tall, floor-to-ceiling, as the floors in the building). Altogether the MC had
about 13 or 14 levels, and I ended up being on every one, for one reason or
another, during my several-year tenure there. (And believe it or not, even at
the end of the bottommost parking level, seeming almost good enough for a bomb
shelter, was yet another storage room where the administrative office kept some
old files.)
I was even on the roof of the MC
one time. (I can no longer do that so easily; I have more of a fear of heights
than I used to.)
This building—which obviously
had to have the structural integrity to have almost train-engine-sized furnaces
and chillers in what was the equivalent of its attic—was designed by a civil
engineer named Donald Cotter, who, after the building was erected by about
1969, was hired to be among its permanent administrative staff. When I knew
him, he was about 50 and was the kindly supervisor of us building managers. I
think he was hired at first in order to work out whatever bugs appertained to
the new building’s settling in to being sufficient, infrastructure-wise, to
what its many patrons wanted out of it. He ended up being the head of us
building managers (mostly students), who usually did nothing that had to do
with civil engineering (though I found I could report to Mr. Cotter, whom my
nightly reports importantly went to, on a physical-plant oddity such as how the
air conditioning was faring in one part of the building—this latter exemplifies
what I’ve found in the many years since, that when you spend a lot of time
alone in a building, you learn about its elaborate personality—how it handles
weather, etc.).
Mr. Cotter, a Black man, was—in
a glimpse at the administrative culture I’ll return to, and don’t mean to be
snide about—a homosexual (among the numerous who worked there) who lived as a
bachelor. He also had a bad hip, requiring his occasional use of a cane and
always making him limp a bit, whether he used the cane or not. Whether due to
his bad hip or something else too, he seemed dour in a way that might be
off-putting if you didn’t know what a generous person he was. He died some
years ago; I last saw him in, I believe, 1994, when I visited the university
for a class reunion, and I stopped by the MC, where its administrative
structure had changed quite a bit.
Here’s the quirky administrative structure: Unlike at
usual student unions, where a council or body of students (not usually the
college student government, I think) would run things, the MC housed (but was
not run by all of) three “equivalents” (very roughly speaking) of such a
council:
* the administrative staff,
which was a paid staff (and the university charged a “Marvin Center fee” to all
students attending, and the MC also took in money in other ways, as we’ve seen
some of) [2/25/13 edit: But I must emphasize that the MC was run by its administrative staff, not the PB or student government discussed below];
* the “Program Board” (PB),
which was a group of students (how they got on it, I don’t know; I think people
ran for election to that, as did those running for student government) that
managed special events like major concerts and appearances by big names (in
those early 1980s days, Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno were still touring stand-up
acts, and they appeared; The Clash was a rock group that was booked by the PB,
which appeared in the not-huge sports arena that was the venue for the school’s
basketball team, among other functions). The PB had offices in the MC, but the
events it arranged often weren’t in the MC (now I believe at smaller schools,
whatever student group ran their student union would also arrange to have
name-brand speakers, musicians, etc., appear there).
* The third “rough equivalent of
a student union board” was the student government, though I could be wrong
about whether the student government at other colleges ever has a role in the
running of the school’s student union. In any event, GW’s student government
had its own responsibilities and enterprises, and it also had an office in the
MC (in fact, Robert Guarasci, who was GW student president for, I think, two
years, was friendly—in fact, roommates—with a fellow student manager, Jeffrey [sp?]
Barth, and (in New Jersey, in much more recent years) I’ve known Bob—not closely—since he started and has had
a varying presiding role in the New Jersey Community Development Corporation,
located in Paterson, for about 18 years. Sometimes we assistant managers were
called to let a student government member into the group’s office, or do some
other minor service. My artificially describing the MC administration, the
Program Broad, and the student government as somehow on a par isn’t quite so
flaky in one connection: Julie Levy, whom I’ll talk about more below, was a
student government member for some time, and seemed serviceable and
unpretentious in her role, but when she graduated (in 1984, as I did), she was
hired by the MC to run a new amenity on the first floor that had some Info Desk/PR
aspect to it—though the old Info Desk on the ground floor remained—and she
struck me as being strikingly self-promoting or at least “boisterous” in her
getting this new amenity off the ground. I’m a little at a loss to describe
what this new amenity was about, other than providing a new “information
conduit,” but her way of handling it did strike me as presuming, which went
hand in hand with a general change in culture in things relating to my job
there—there would be numerous more changes in the future—that veered away from
the culture I’d known from 1980 to 1984.
From another angle, there were
two “student leader” councils—the Program Board and the student government—and neither
ran the MC, and meanwhile the MC was run by a paid staff. (This situation
changed by 1994, in that there had been a merger of the Program Board and the
MC staff; this surprised me when I found out. I don’t
know how well this ended up working.)
I think a lot of students who
were at GW when I was didn’t really understand the way the MC had its own
sizable paid administrative staff; and certainly we assistant managers, with
our walkie-talkies on our belts, struck some students as seemingly
self-important and/or puzzling. But all this helps set the groundwork for some
of the colorful anecdotes I will offer.
The big administrative staff, and some “ancillary” other workers
The administrative staff of the
MC included, as I recall (and I don’t think these people would mind my using
their names, since this is so long ago, and many may have moved on, if not have
died). I will include “B” to indicate the person is Black, partly to show the racially
ecumenical nature of the group, and I will also include “D” to indicate his or
her hours were usually daytime:
Boris Bell (D), the director
(the highest-level staffer)—a kindly man and fairly close to retirement then (he retired in 1987);
Donald Cotter (B; D), operations
director (whatever title he had);
Johnnie ____ (B; D), the
accountant—who could be a tough bird; once, when bags from cashiers’ posts were
turning up short of the cash that was supposed to be there per the accounting
forms in the bags, he threatened to take the shortfall out of the relevant
students’ pay, and I think this actually happened; that sort of move wouldn’t
fly today, I think;
Jim Pritchett (B; D), who was
the daytime staffer in charge of what “assistant managers” did—he set up and took
down AV equipment as needed, and also wrote out plans for us night workers as
to how equipment would be laid out. A very nice and approachable guy—he had
been a pre-med student, and left that route; he also played good electric
guitar, and I have a cassette tape of me and him playing guitar together in his
office—with him good, me stumbling a bit;
Thelma Riggs (I think her last
name was) (B; D), a staffer who was head of the Housekeeping staff—I rarely interacted
with her;
Carolyn Jefferson (B; D),
nicknamed “C.J.,” who was a sort of “broad-picture” events-attractor and –scheduler—she
was fairly frequently criticized there by numerous coworkers, and she is most
subject to reassessment by me today, because I didn’t fully comprehend the main reason for her job, though there were
plenty of times she let us night staffers down with some oversight or mistake that
she had made in her daytime job; she was also a single mother with a daughter,
Nkeisha (yes, I believe that’s the spelling). There is a blog entry on her here;
Janet Scott (D), a sort of admin
who worked under Carolyn—a steady, quiet, professional sort, but I think she
had a minor stroke at one point, and I don’t know if she had some other health
issue that led her to be a somewhat somber, inscrutable sort;
Wilfred V. DeGrasse (B), one of
the few nighttime staffers we assistant managers regularly worked with; he had
weekday nights (while, little overlapping with him when I was a staffer, I had
weekend nights). He was a colorful
character, a short, stocky man who was a minister in his “day job”; he was
married but unable to have kids (due to some physical issue his wife had), and he
was originally from the Caribbean. He had a somewhat loud, deep voice, which at
least one student manager attributed to his having been a chief petty officer
in the Navy [corrected 2/25/13], or such. He flirted with female student workers at the
MC—and as a result, one of them, Angela White (B), who worked at the Information
Desk, called him “Snake in DeGrasse.” There are a few colorful stories to tell
about him. I am fond of his memory—I don’t know if he’s alive now (he had bad
high blood pressure in 1985). I’ll do a separate entry on him--info on him is viewable in the second half of this. [See first bracketed editorial note at start of Part 2.]
Zak Johnson, the third-shift
building manager, also another of the homosexuals [see second bracketed editorial note at start of Part 2]. With a fun sense of humor.
And one time he invited a few of us student managers (including me) to some
farm house in Virginia he was renting. I’m kind of foggy on details, and it’s a
little hard to explain what that farm house situation was about (I didn’t go
for a party or anything else hedonistic)—but I did use a walk through a
cornfield there as a “template” for one chapter of my novel The Folder Hunt.
Jim Becker (D), another of the
homosexuals [see second bracketed editorial note at start of Part 2], was hired rather late into my tenure at the MC, maybe in late 1984
or early 1985. He was an assistant to Mr. Cotter, I think, but I never
understood what the necessity was for his job. At times he overlapped with me
in dealings, and he generally wasn’t hard to get along with, but I think at
rare times, there was a bit of a meddlesome flavor to what he did with me.
There were other staffers who
were hired in about 1984, the year I was hired as a staffer, but they weren’t
part of the MC administrative staff itself, though they might attend some of
its meetings. There was Andy Moskowitz, who managed the theater (first as a
student, then as a staffer), and a Julie Levy, who, as I said above, had been on
the student government and then became head of a new facility on the first floor
whose name now escapes me and was in full bloom in later 1984 and through 1985.
I’ll try to remember more of that facility and stories appending to it, later (I believe it was called the Info Center; a separate entry on it will come).
One student worker at this facility was Diane Hockstein, whom I might have
things to say about in a future entry. Diane became an attorney, but was in her
junior year (but was pre-law, if I recall), I think, when I was last there in
1985.
There were plenty of student
workers, differing over years, whether “assistant managers” or workers at the Info
Desk or the game room whom I interacted with over the years. There was also a
small record store on the ground floor that, I think, deposited its register
cash-bag at shift’s end in the administrative office (entailing my, or another
assistant manager’s, occasional involvement with its staffers), but otherwise I
had very little to do with it. At least two student workers there tried to
start an alternative literary magazine for GW in 1984, with me contributing
some creative help, but it didn’t get off the ground due to lack of support
from the school board (comprising faculty and students, if I recall)
responsible for approving such an enterprise (because it sought school funding,
I think).
There were a few temporary
workers who were hired in late 1984, I think it was, to start a cumbersome
process (meant to be time-limited) of transferring room-scheduling records from
their paper form into a computer database, which at that time involved a Wang
computer that occasionally had technical problems. Even I was involved in doing
data entry in that project for a time.
One person involved with this
was a Jessica Emami, who was an assistant to Janet Scott and who I think was paid
as a staffer (Jessica might have started as a student worker, and have become a
regular staffer) and ended up doing more than just the emergent data entry. She
was an Iranian-American student of GWU, of about 21, who was nice and, once or
twice, impressed me with her ability to speak on the phone to a relative or
friend and swing back and forth between English and Farsi as if
turning on a dime. One memorable thing about her is that she suffered a
depressive breakdown in 1985, and had to be hospitalized at Georgetown
University Hospital; I visited her there (or tried to) one time. When she
returned to work, seeming stilted as an aftereffect of her breakdown/treatment,
I had a bit of talk with her about whatever she was willing to discuss of her
ongoing issues. She spoke about wanting to get a gun, because of ongoing petty crime
she was aware of down the street from where she lived. (Today I would advise
someone in her position against getting a gun.) I was very much a novice with
her type of health situation, then.
There was another woman who, in
1985, was an assistant to Janet Scott, or such, whose name escapes me but whose
face I can picture. I think she had also had some psychiatric issue at some
point, but this had been prior to her working at the MC. I don’t recall if she
was a student; she may have been a grad student. Can’t remember. She was still working
at the MC when I was in the process of leaving the Washington, D.C., area in
early 1986.
What’s next
This was a big facility, with a
big staff (among which was a variety of personalities you had to square with,
as some of them had to square with mine—I was pretty pliant in those days, but
asserted myself with enough good taste on the basis of experience), and a wide
array of all sorts of contingencies to deal with:
* setting up AV equipment and
lights for a dance (one piece of equipment was the “disco system,” a behemoth
of a contraption with two state-of-the-art turntables, big stand-alone
speakers, and long cables to hook up);
* dealing with demanding regular
users of the building (like the “Israeli Folkdancers”—actually, a group that
practiced Israeli folkdancing, but they were American Jews, and headed by a
doctor whose face I remember and name I forget—they could be quite demanding at
times);
* emergencies like, yes, the
possibility of phoned-in bomb threats we managers (as were the Info Desk staff)
were taught how to handle, and the occasional fire or an elevator getting stuck
with multiple people on it; occasional criminal acts, including some
particularly sordid ones involving the bathrooms I’ll touch on in a future
entry;
and much, much else.
Here is a projected set of
themes, some provisional, that future entries on the MC will deal with (these
do not all necessarily reflect entry headlines):
Part 2, Becoming a regular staffer, and occasional “reactions” to my
regularly filed reports; and a profile of Mr. DeGrasse
Part 3: The [pros and cons] of “C.J.,” Carolyn Jefferson
Part 4: The Gay People’s Alliance and their Halloween party, among
other colorful occasional events
Part 5: The time I let some homeless people sleep in the theater, and I
stayed overnight to watch them
[The following are unnumbered, because even more formative:]
Fern K., a schizophrenic woman who became something of a spectacle on
campus
The “bathroom gays”—a tacky topic, but an important component of the
jobs of a number of us there
Andy Cohen—a lively personality, and a mystery man
